Bilog ang Mundo

Nobody had seen it coming. That is if you asked the neigborhood of Cityhomes over the destiny that had embraced Ignacio Guevarra. Who can, in the first place, notice such talent about to take by storm the local literary scene and the international as well, when a man's worth is gauged by his material success seen through the eyes of drivers, welders, office employees, accountants, secretaries, housewives, and, well, bums. They did not even know such professions such as writers exist. For them, it seemed, taking a supervisory position in a small company is proof already of outstanding and uncanny talent.

Well, who could have thought Ignacio Guevarra was groomed for something greater than they ever had thought. They never paid attention to him as he burned the streets, day in and day out, in his tribike delivering softdrinks and beers to the stores in the subdivision. For them, Ignacio was merely another man breaking his back and stubborn against the elements to put food in his grumbling stomach.

They were times when they heard Ignacio talked about who he really was, or what the future that awaited him. A new customer asked him once if he had skipped going to work as he put the cases of softdrinks at the back of the store. His reply was: "I'm a writer. I don't work."

"Oh, what do you drive then?"

"No, sir," Ignacio said. "I'm a writer that's why I just stay at home."

Yet, nobody really took his pronouncements seriously. Ignacio, afterall, had been a delivery boy for several years now, and this kind of pronouncement coming from a person such as he, could only be attributed to delusion of grandeur.

Probably, if someone who had known his for the first time his claims would be given thought and consideration. But it was inevitable that after weeks he would be seen sweating under the noonday sun paddling desperately to carry the load of his tribike. Then they would eventually gauge him as another nobody dreaming for an unreachable social importance.

So during those times when they found themselves sitting beside Ignacio in some neigjhborhood yard boozing, they would let him put himself a little higher from his social status as a delivery boy, listening halfheartedly to his style of wisdom.

At first, they usually would mock his statements by sarcastic rejoinders to put him to his right place: "Then how can you explain your life?" they would ask and convulsed in a fit of laughters. But Ignacio was quick to parry these blows by enigmatic counter-rejoinders such as: "I dont have to explain myself because nobody can understand somebody who understands everybody."

So they let him be with his sense of grandeur. Anyway, they thought, he's harmless. What can little grandstanding done by a dregs of society do to them. Nothing. The fact is he is still a delivery boy no matter how hard he tries to claim as somebody, their collective judgment concluded.

Then one day, a couple of sleek cars began to pull over by the front of Ignacio's house. Neighbors would see well-dressed and groomed individuals came and went out of his house, and one neighbor even spotted a television personality he could not put anywhere in his map of showbiz people. Probably, somebody important, the neighbor thought.

These were the times when Ignacio's presence in the streets paddling his tribike diminished until nobody could no longer see him delivering softdrinks and beers. They thought Ignacio went bankrupt.

It took sometime before somebody could give explaination as to what Ignacio was up to those days. A neighbor reading a national broadsheet chanced him on its pages. There on the glorious pages of a national broadsheet, Ignacio had written a column, with a picture of his darkened face brought by too much sun, smiling pedantically beside his byline.

It was then when everybody in the neighborhood started treating him differently, and with seriousness now. They were all, in fact, would do anything even if it meant forsaking their lives just for their names to land on the pages of a newspaper. And, Ignacio had done it without doing something as imaginable as that.

Then Ignacio moved out of their neighborhood. The last thing that they heard about him was he had published six books, three of them novels which some of their children in college read for book reviews, and had been jet-setting around the world as a respective writer lecturing on modern human conditions and literature.

Well, nobody among them had seen it coming until it happened.

Now, when they drink during weekends and talk about the past years, they never forget to mention in their conversation about the delivery boy who used to claim himself as a writer. Twist of fate, they would say. One of them aptly put it: "Kunsabay, bilog ang mundo."